Big data with large

With large amounts of information streaming in from countless sources, banks are faced with finding new and innovative ways to manage big data. While its important to understand customers and boost their satisfaction, its equally important to minimize risk and fraud while maintaining regulatory compliance. Big data brings big insights, but it also requires financial institutions to stay one step ahead of the game with advanced analytics.

Educators armed with data-driven insight can make a significant impact on school systems, students and curriculums. By analyzing big data, they can identify at-risk students, make sure students are making adequate progress, and can implement a better system for evaluation and support of teachers and principals.

When government agencies are able to harness and apply analytics to their big data, they gain significant ground when it comes to managing utilities, running agencies, dealing with traffic congestion or preventing crime. But while there are many advantages to big data, governments must also address issues of transparency and privacy.

Armed with insight that big data can provide, manufacturers can boost quality and output while minimizing waste processes that are key in todays highly competitive market. More and more manufacturers are working in an analytics-based culture, which means they can solve problems faster and make more agile business decisions.

Customer relationship building is critical to the retail industry and the best way to manage that is to manage big data. Retailers need to know the best way to market to customers, the most effective way to handle transactions, and the most strategic way to bring back lapsed business. Big data remains at the heart of all those things. Big data in action: UPS

As a company with many pieces and parts constantly in motion, UPS stores a large amount of data much of which comes from sensors in its vehicles. That data not only monitors daily performance, but also triggered a major redesign of UPS drivers route structures. The initiative was called ORION (On-Road Integration Optimization and Navigation), and was arguably the worlds largest operations research project. It relied heavily on online map data to reconfigure a drivers pickups and drop-offs in real time.

The project led to savings of more than 8.4 million gallons of fuel by cutting 85 million miles off of daily routes. UPS estimates that saving only one daily mile per driver saves the company $30 million, so the overall dollar savings are substantial. Learn More About Industries Using This Technology

Its important to remember that the primary value from big data comes not from the data in its raw form, but from the processing and analysis of it and the insights, products, and services that emerge from analysis. The sweeping changes in big data technologies and management approaches need to be accompanied by similarly dramatic shifts in how data supports decisions and product Thomas H. Davenport in Big Data in Big Companies

Data Exploration Visualization

SAS makes it easy to understand what your data has to tell you. Interactively explore billions of rows of data in seconds. How It Works Before discovering how big data can work for your business, you should first understand where it comes from. The sources for big data generally fall into one of three categories:

Streaming data

This category includes data that reaches your IT systems from a web of connected devices. You can analyze this data as it arrives and make decisions on what data to keep, what not to keep and what requires further analysis.

Social media data

The data on social interactions is an increasingly attractive set of information, particularly for marketing, sales and support functions. Its often in unstructured or semistructured forms, so it poses a unique challenge when it comes to consumption and analysis.

Publicly available sources

Massive amounts of data are available through open data sources like the US governments data.gov, the CIA World Factbook or the European Union Open Data Portal. After identifying all the potential sources for data, consider the decisions youll need to make once you begin harnessing information. These include:

How to store and manage it

Whereas storage would have been a problem several years ago, there are now low-cost options for storing data if thats the best strategy for your business.

How much of it to analyze

Some organizations dont exclude any data from their analyses, which is possible with todays high-performance technologies such as grid computing or in-memory analytics. Another approach is to determine upfront which data is relevant before analyzing it.

How to use any insights you uncover

The more knowledge you have, the more confident youll be in making business decisions. Its smart to have a strategy in place once you have an abundance of information at hand. The final step in making big data work for your business is to research the technologies that help you make the most of big data and big data analytics. Consider:

How do free-to-play video games earn big profits? How does the industry leader of free-to-play, massively multiplayer online games scale its customer intelligence and analytics efforts to thousands of models and terabytes of data a day? With industrialized modeling from SAS. 5 machine learning mistakes and how to avoid them Machine learning is not magic. It presents many of the same challenges as other analytics methods. Learn how to overcome those challenges and incorporate this technique into your analytics strategy. Can data sharing help cure cancer? Clinical trials can bring new drugs and new hope to the market for cancer patients. Now, a new data sharing platform for clinical trial data brings even more hope. Becoming Cognitive Cognitive computing is an outgrowth of artificial intelligence, with a healthy dose of big data thrown in.